Sunday, 19 January 2014

Death, Dogma and The Nazis

On Christmas Day 2011 at about six o’clock in the
evening, my mother and I held my unconscious father as he took his last
breaths. He passed away after a week of lying unfed and unconscious. He was 84.
I had never seen anyone die in front of me before, let alone someone in my
arms, let alone my own father. It was a life-changing moment and in that
moment, I had an epiphany.

Death

For the entirety of his life, my father remained a
committed Catholic. When people in their droves abandoned the church in the
1970s and 80s, my father hung in there and persisted in his attendance at Mass
and his observance of the various Catholic rituals that pepper the liturgical
year. Against the current of the time, he continued in his faith according to
its Catholic traditions despite his four sons and many of his friends
abandoning church allegiance and a Catholic worldview. Yet he continued to assist
his local parish in their accounting procedures and to be a regular reader of
the lesson at Mass. He prayed, he participated in the Eucharist, he worshipped
weekly, he enacted his faith to the best of his ability over the course of his
life.

I held my father's hand

Yet at his death, there was no observable sign of the
church nor any observable symbols of religion. There was no priest, there were
no nuns, no religious, no praying, no singing, no hymns, no rosaries, no
incense, no Bible, no ostensible sign of the church at all. There was just my
mother and me. His wife and companion of 63 years, and his third son, a gay man
and his partner, another gay man who held his feet at the foot of the bed. To
any objective observer or passer-by, there was no sign of religion in that
room. No-one could have looked in and mistaken what was happening for any kind
of religious ritual or ceremony. Further, all the beliefs about religious or
faith issues were not present, neither in my father nor in me. Not a single church rule or rubric, not a single Biblical debate entered my mind.But there was
love in that room. Love held him tight. Love caressed him. Love’s tears fell
upon him. Love was spoken. Love let him go to end his suffering. If love was
light, then the room would have been suffused in a beautiful gentle sunset
light. Powerful, deep, profound love that enveloped him and us.

During my over 30 years as a Christian, I have heard
every conceivable debate over what’s right and what’s wrong, what is correct
thinking and what is not, what is truth and what is heresy, what is acceptable
behaviour and what is unacceptable so that now, in my 54th year, and
with the memory of that room and that moment seared into my mind forever, I
have come to a very different conclusion about so-called orthodoxy and doctrine,
what the Christian life is, and more generally, what life is all about. For, when
it comes down to it, we all leave this world inevitably, sometimes peacefully
and beautifully, but as often as not, painfully, messily and in an undignified
manner. What matters at that moment is all important.

What matters at that moment is not what your beliefs are but
your life. What matters is whether you’ve lived and loved and grown. And it’s
the same for everybody, Christian and non-Christian alike. Have you lived,
loved and grown?

Dogma

In the Christian world, we have centralised beliefs to
the place of apex. And we have done so to the detriment of understanding our
humanity. If incarnational Christianity means anything at all, then it focuses
on our humanity, what it means to be human, and how this messy and often difficult life all hangs together. What doesn’t matter is a set of precepts that I might have
adhered to, some set of beliefs about God, the cosmos, humanity and the church,
or God forbid, church governance. Let me spell this out because it links
directly to the nub of why I am writing this post.

At my father’s passing, it didn’t matter which side he
came down on in his attitudes to:

Infant baptism vs believer’s baptism

Reformation models of Scripture Alone vs
Catholic models of Church Tradition as handed down by the teaching Magisterium

Biblical inerrancy vs the presence of
Biblical inconsistency

Whether he had had the Sacrament of
Reconciliation (Confession)

Whether he had had the sacrament of
Confirmation

Whether the Gifts of the Holy Spirit ended
in New Testament times vs they are available today

Whether miracles happen today

Whether sex before marriage is a sinful act
vs it can be explained in today’s world via modern mechanisms of thought

Whether the Eucharist is best modelled by
transubstantiation vs consubstantiation vs it is symbolic/emblematic

Whether the Bible is the Word of God vs it is the Word about God

Whether women should be allowed to be
priests vs they should not be allowed to speak in church at all

Whether Jesus is God vs whether he was a
God-filled man

Whether God intervenes in this world supernaturally vs we
are alone to make of this world what we can with God's grace

Whether suffering is a result of ‘the fall’
vs it is part of the human condition and always would have been

Whether God’s salvific creative act is for
everyone and all creation vs it is only for those who say a special prayer to
activate it in their lives otherwise they’re not in

Whether Jesus died on the cross for our sins
vs he died because of our sins

Whether Jesus physically rose from the grave
as a re-animated formerly dead human being vs he was some kind of spirit vs the
whole thing was a story to assist in understanding the nature of Jesus as
Christ

Whether in a proposed afterlife, we keep our
consciousness vs we lose it

Whether heaven or hell exists

Whether Christians can be oppressed by a
demon

Whether demons or devils exist

AND
I COULD GO ON AND ON AND ON AND ON

For over thirty years, I have heard various groups
within the church all argue these and a hundred other issues out as though they
are the crux of what it means to be human and Christian. And each is convinced
that they have the truth of it and that others are in error. The truth or error
of a particular belief has become the most import thing. It is as though humanity has been high-jacked by
the orthodoxy police so that you have to believe certain ‘facts’ before you can
be counted as a true Christian. And of course the ones who do the counting are
the same ones who set the rules as to which precepts you have to believe.

As I looked at my father’s closed eyes and watched him
draw his last four breaths, I had an epiphany.

None of this stuff matters.

We
waste our lives and our energies and our thoughts and our behaviour on all this. We squander our precious time on all this religious fluff as though this
is what God wakes up and thinks about every morning. Yes, it might be interesting
academically. But even there, I think there are far more important things we
Christians need to be concerning ourselves with regarding the centrality of our
faith. But our transposal of the important stuff that Jesus was actually into over to the side, to the periphery, and putting in its place all this doctrine and
dogma as though these are the central questions is I think to miss the point
entirely.

Look at Jesus. He lived his entire public life breaking
social and religious rules and conventions. He actually taught against having this
kind of spirituality. He couldn’t be bothered with it at all. His words,
recounted in the Gospel of Matthew where he is taking apart the Pharisees, echo
down through the ages to today. “Blind guides! You strain your water so you
won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel! (23: 24).” These words
are powerful, pointed, unswerving and non-negotiable. He isn’t remotely
interested in religious fastidiousness as a way of life and repudiates such
religion as being blind and selfish and part of a spirituality that he deems
bankrupt and illegitimate. He rejects any idea that the Realm of God is made up
of one set of orthodox precepts that you have to believe or you’re not in. When
the Pharisees, the religious show-ponies and pedants of his social sphere,
asked him a trick question to see if he had ‘the right answer’ about the
greatest commandment, he answered with love at the centre of the response, not
some belief or religious precept or ritual. "You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This
is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love
your neighbour as yourself” (Matt. 22: 37-38).

What my father’s death gave me was a profound moment in
time where I could put just a few pieces of life’s puzzle together to make some
sense of it all. It is that our lives are what counts – whether we have lived,
loved and grown, not whether we have recited a sinners’ prayer or gone to Mass
or attended synagogue or mosque or believed certain principles. It is our
lives. God loves us whether we make his presence conscious in our lives or not.
There is nothing that can change that. For those of us who do choose to make
God’s presence conscious in our lives, then the whole thing can be summarised as our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. The prophet
Micah put it this way, very much on the Jesus side of things. In answering the
question: ‘what DOES the Lord require of us as human beings?’ His answer is as
simple as it is timeless and beautiful. ‘To do justly, to love mercy, and to
walk humbly with your God’ (6: 8). That’s it.

Be just and honest in your
dealings with your fellow human beings, love mercy and compassion and look
after your neighbour, and love God and be conscious of his Spirit in your life
and in the lives of all those around you. How stunningly beautiful. Gamaliel,
the famous rabbi who was Jesus’ contemporary answered the same question that
Jesus was asked and he gave the same answer, after which he said, “and the rest
is commentary”. If you read the Gospels, you will see for yourself that Jesus
spells this out time and time again in virtually every teaching and example of
his life.

Stanford Prison Experiment

Unswerving commitment to dogma, doctrine and ‘our view
of orthodoxy’ has gotten the church and the world into all sorts of
difficulties and has impoverished it to its roots. The church has so often
completely missed the boat by making central the things that Jesus considered
the most unimportant. Where humanity is forgotten, the value and dignity of
every person, individuals and groups are depersonalised and violence ensues. Stanley
Milgram’s electrification experiment and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
both stand testament to the atrocities that good human beings can commit when
following orthodox belief blindly and unquestioningly. It explains the My Lai
massacre. It explains the Abu Ghraib torture. It explains religious terrorism
across the centuries and in our own day.

Unswerving commitment to dogma in the hands of the
Christian church saw the Catholic Church in 1415 burn John Hus at the stake
over his dissent from understanding the church itself and the Eucharist. Countless
thousands died at the hands of the Church which believed it was doing God’s
will according to its understanding.

And the Reformers were not blameless either. In 1541, perhaps
the most famous reformer of them all next to Luther, John Calvin, returned to
Geneva and set up a harsh and austere theocracy that brooked no dissent. He
co-opted the secular authorities and interfered in the private lives of Geneva’s
citizens according to his own understanding of things. And Calvin was no
merry-man life of the party kind of guy. He ruthlessly quashed anything remotely joyous and
any semblance of gaiety as being hindrances to the work of God. His inability
to discuss issues in what we would term a collegial and civil manner saw him in
1553 acquiesce to having Michael Servetus burned at the stake over what looks
like a theological rivalry turned murderous.

Abu Ghraib Prison Iraq

Make no mistake, blind,
unquestioning, unswerving commitment to dogma, whether religious or political,
typically becomes aggressive and violent. And it does not have to be physical violence alone that counts as violence. Examples of psychological and emotional violence perpetrated upon people by Christian dogmatic loyalists are numberless. People have been screwed over by dogmatists for centuries with immeasurable turmoil created in lives. Churches still hurt people today; regularly.

Gay people have particularly been at the receiving end
of ‘orthodox’ belief about human sexuality and certain Bible verses and
Biblical interpretation. As a result, we have been pilloried and persecuted by
the church and by societies for centuries.

Doctrine and dogma will have us as:

Intrinsically disordered

Inclined to moral evil

An abomination

Sinners

Perverts

Degraded

Shameful

Weak-minded

Sick

Deviant

Psycho-pathological

Nigerian president President Goodluck Jonathon
Photograph Matt Dunham/AP The Guardian

I write this blog-post because I see dogma again today
turning aggressive and violent. India has recriminalised homosexuality. Russia goes
on an aggressive and often vigilante-driven hate of gay people under the embarrassing
ignorance of not propagandising children. And Africa has gone further. There
are deaths. Nigeria passes a law that sees gay relationships and memberships of
clubs or organisations punishable by ten years imprisonment and fourteen years
for a marriage. The President, Goodluck Jonathon’s spokesperson, said, “This is
a law that is in line with the people's cultural and religious inclination. So
it is a law that is a reflection of the beliefs and orientation of Nigerian
people … Nigerians are pleased with it."

Roger Jean-Claude Mbede from Cameroon was arrested and imprisoned for three years for sending the text message: "I am very much in love with you" to another man. He was permitted to go to hospital for treatment on a hernia recently but his family removed him from the hospital one month ago saying that he was "a curse for them" and that authorities should let him die. Roger died on or around 10th January 2014.

Political masters using
Christianity to deny human rights is an abomination and is an indictment on the
church itself for being so ambiguous as to let these men say what they say and behave as they do in Christ's name.
Their forebears in South Africa used dogma and doctrine and the Bible to
pronounce that apartheid was good and fitting and God’s natural way. The American slavers
and those who benefited from their actions likewise used dogma and doctrine and
the Bible to enslave tens of thousands of people and to pronounce that it too
was good and right and fitting and God’s natural way.

As a Christian, I am no saint. I have all sorts of
questions that do not have ready answers. There are things about the Christian
life that do not make sense to me. There are elements of orthodoxy from both my Catholic and evangelical roots that I no longer believe. I do have a faith albeit a very human faith. It is honest and enquiring. Doubt is part of it. I do not understand God. I don't think anyone does or can. There are those out there who value orthodoxy
above all else who would deem me a heretic. It wouldn’t be the first time I have
been called one, as some very loving Christians ascribed that epithet to me
when I came out as a gay man. But, it doesn't matter. I am not using the same model as they use. We look though different prisms now. From our records of him, I know what Jesus was like and that he
rejected the domination systems of this world where the more powerful lord it
over the weaker, that he loved compassion and that he gave what is probably the
greatest teaching on treating our fellow human beings that has ever existed. I also know
what kind of spirituality he didn’t like. He made it quite plain. And I know that he spoke of God as a
relational God whose nature is love. That is enough for me. The rest, to channel
Gamaliel, is commentary, and I don’t think it matters.

When my father died in that moment, it was his life that
counted, not his set of religious or political beliefs. At that moment, all that fell away. I believe that it will be the same for me and for you
too.

The Nazis

There is a light-hearted meme that says the first person to mention the Nazis in a disagreement or argument loses the battle. It is based on the notion that since the Nazis were so extreme, so cruel and calculated as to be inhuman, no modern day comparison can be legitimate. The problem with that scenario is that it exculpates us from similar monstrous behaviour were we to be put into similar conditions as those of the German soldiers of the Third Reich. If you don’t believe me, Google the two experiments I touched on above. We like to think of the Nazis as being beneath human. Not us. But the Nazis were very human. They were not only not beyond what humans are capable of when belief goes awry and dogma is made king, but they enacted their barbarism through very human thinking, logic, emotion and behaviour. Yes, there was tribalism of the worst kind, a nationalistic fervour that saw the Aryan race as superior to all others but it was this unshakeable belief in this precept that was the driving force behind the Final Solution with all of its violence, dehumanisation and cruelty.

I end this blog-post which is essentially a warning
against a top-down spiritual orthodoxy based on unalterable doctrine and dogma
with a clip from Professor Jacob Bronowski. This scientist and polymath
intellectual of the twentieth century made a thirteen-part documentary that was
first aired in 1973. It was called ‘The Ascent of Man’ and with long unscripted
‘talking head’ sequences but wonderful location shots, it was not expected to
do all that well. However, it was ranked 63rd in the top 100
television shows ever made.

In one of the final parts of The Ascent of Man, Professor Bronowski visits Auschwitz where he had lost members of his family. He agreed
to go there provided that there would be one camera, one take and one scene
with him. He ended up by a pond where the remains of people’s ashes had been
pumped; and very likely, those of some of his family members. As he stood
there, his daughter tells, his prized crocodile shoes began to sink into the
mud surrounding the pond and get covered in water, so Bronowski simply walked
out into the pond and standing in the water, gave what is one of the great speeches, and all the more
for its unscripted nature, against the violence that is always inherent in
dogma and orthodoxy and the need for humanity to continue to keep questioning, to keep searching through science and an enquiring mind. It is very powerful. The words spoken as they are in that particular pond by this particular man should have us wary and skeptical about dogma forever.

So, if you’re going to be a person of faith, any faith,
then please, act justly, love mercy and compassion and above all, walk HUMBLY
with your God.